Ask not what our God can do for us...
LENT 2020 – Day 27
Is 65, 17-21; Ps 29, 2.4, 5-6, 11-12a. 13b; Jn 4, 43-54
God is not a politician; He keeps his word. However, we do not keep our word for we have become worse than that breed. What Isaiah prophesied would have become a reality if Israel had responded in earnest. Unfortunately, the Chosen People paid only lip service to God, as politicians do to their voters. For His part, God again and again invited them with love and promise – “not more shall be heard the sound of weeping and the cry of distress”, and He would graciously and mercifully forget their past offences. But they rejected the covenants and even the Son of God when He came down from Heaven.
“Not more shall be heard the sound of weeping and the cry of distress”: wouldn’t that be music to our ears in the present days of the Covid-19 pandemic? Well, nothing is impossible with God. He can create new heavens and a new earth; or at the end of the world, He might even leave the material planet untouched and therein simply place an entirely new race.
Meanwhile, why can’t we be that new race? What are we lacking in? We have the promise of God’s help; we only need to respond favourably. He has given us innumerable signs; we have only to acknowledge them humbly, as did the Galileans, after they saw all that Jesus had done in Jerusalem. In fact, they’d earlier witnessed His first miracle – the changing of water into wine – in Cana of Galilee. And now He healed the son of an official who entreated Him with faith; He did not put up His price, like the politicians do.
The world would be a better place had we accepted Jesus with all our heart. Even impostors enjoy acceptance whereas an authentic prophet has no honour in his own country. Similarly, we are ever-ready to receive blessings from the Lord. When will we begin to give Him of ourselves?
